1. Field of the Invention
Exemplary aspects of the present invention generally relate to a data search device, a data search method employed in the data search device, and a recording medium including a control program for causing the data search device to execute the data search method, and particularly relate to how to display results of data search.
2. Description of the Background
Ever-increasing amounts of searchable data and search results have elevated the importance of technologies for searching electronic data and displaying the search results in an easy-to-understand format. When the number of search results is too large, it is difficult for a user to find the desired data.
To solve this problem, a technique in which search results are classified into clusters based on their content in order to display the search results on a two-dimensional coordinate space is proposed.
In the above-described technique, two clusters of document units are extracted from a document database and a degree of relevance between each element in the clusters is calculated to display the results on a two-dimensional coordinate space in accordance with a level of the degree of relevance thus calculated. As a result, a user can visually confirm which data is relevant to the document units extracted from the document database.
However, because it is necessary to analyze words included in the document in the above-described technique, it takes a longer time to search the data. Consequently, it is difficult to apply the above-described technique to, for example, a search method for acquiring search results while changing search requirements.
Further, because coordinate axes of the two-dimensional coordinate space are dynamically determined based on the group of documents to be searched and the search results, a different group of documents searched and the search results cannot be two-dimensionally displayed in an overlapping manner on the same coordinate space so as to allow the user to compare search results.
It is to be noted that the above-described problems may occur when searching data other than document data including texts, such as image data.